Knowing Tranquility Part XX: Miyajima

The final of the Inland Sea series, over at Japan Visitor. Links to the previous nineteen entries can be found at the bottom of the page.

https://www.japanvisitor.com/japan-cit…/miyajima-tranquility


On the turntable:  The Doobie Brothers:  "Minute by Minute"

On the Road of the Beats in Yaponesia

Tokyo Poetry Journal has been publishing interesting work for years, and it a pleasure to be included in their newest anthology, themed Japan and the Beats.  It was Beats writing that got me out on the road in the first place, so it is important to me that I am able to honor them.  More details can be found here.
  
 On the turntable:  Lush, "Ciao!"

Imbibing Bibliophile #61

Hemingway on War by Ernest Hemingway

(flight), Kyoto Brewing Company

On the turntable:  Jon Hassell, "Last Night the Moon Came Dropping its Clothes in the Street"

Imbibing Bibliophile #60

Mani by  Patrick Leigh Fermor

Suruga Bay IPA, Baird Brewing Company

On the turntable: The Jam, "In the City"

Cantata

Diving deeper into the timelessness of Nara. Standing before the array of deities on the altar of Akishino-dera. The Yakushi Buddha at center sits, as he has for 1300 years. I think of all that has happened since—all the wars, disasters, migrations, civilizations come and gone. And through it all he sits, right hand raised, palm forward, saying,  It ain’t nothing but a thing. All is okay.

 
On the turntable:  J. S. Bach, "Bach 2000"

Sunday Papers: Antoine de Saint Exupéry

"Idiots are very dangerous -- so are intelligent people, if they are in a group."


On the turntable:  Joni Mitchell, "Court and Spark"

The Road to Italy

The first post of the year, over at Provincial Perch...

http://viewsfromaprovincialperch.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-road-to-italy.html

On the nighttable W. Somerset Maugham, "Collected Short Stories, Vol. 4"
On the turntable:  Johnny Winter, "And Live"    

 

Happy New Year!

A year in reads: 2018

On the turntable:  Grateful Dead, "1972.05.07  Bickershaw Festival"

Miracle on Third Street: Walking Kyoto’s Sanjo Dori

"In our final Deep Kyoto post of 2018, Edward J. Taylor completes his walking exploration of Kyoto's Sanjo Dori in the company of friend Max Dodds. Together they contemplate the shared memories of our collective history and wonder how the present will be remembered in times to come... "
  
Part One

Part Two

On the turntable:   J. Geils Band,  "The Best of the J. Geils Band"

 

(untitled)

Of a year on the wane,
Traces washed away by
Sake and rain.

On the turntable:  Grateful Dead, Dick's Picks Vol. 34"
 

Shards 2018

And in the continuing spirit of year-end cleaning, I came across a number of fragments written over the last decade:

"In Carl Jung's psychology, metanoia indicates a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form. Jung believed that psychotic episodes in particular could be understood as existential crises that were sometimes attempts at self-reparation."

         

--World, Underworld, Overworld, Dreamworld By Mike Hockney

Slouching to a Different Drummer

Small Wars in Faraway Places

 Japan --  Movement without momentum

Socially enraged Buddhism (punk)

Celts dividing the year in half, the dark half of winter a long wait for light

Yoga's popularity in the 1990s as a means of controlling end of millennium fears

Laugh like rusty hinges (nasal)

In 2008, the government of Ecuador gave the natural world the same civil rights as to humans. In contrast, the US gave civil rights to corporations.

Anti-social social club

Hysterical piss bottle theatrics

Tennyson-- “O sorrow, wilt thou live with me / No casual mistress but a wife.”

“I know more about how my meat was raised than the meat did.”

Hopping into bedlam

Road coffee, served hot and weak in styrofoam cups. 

The close relationship of DNA to the environment (and subsequently arising culture) is disconnected due to mass migrations in modern times, which leads to more psychosis.

People upset their country is dead.  All that remains is who gets to pilfer the remains.

Heian shades of winter

Churches of the west are meant to be filled with the presence of God.  Religious centers of the east are filled with the presence of oneself.

To follow a blog one must be prepared for the lack of closure. Bloggers tend to give up suddenly without any notice; you'll always be left wondering whatever happened to the person,  how the day-to-day life that you have long been following turns out.

Yesterday's news is tomorrow's history. 

The song of the bird gives way to that of the cicada.  

Life is simply a day to day struggle to make sense of things. 

Sometimes I feel like I'm a hospice worker, sitting at the bedside to watch Japan as it dies. 

Behind every traveler writer is a frustrated novelist.

Kitchens are made for dancing 

On the inflight map there were more names for rivers than for actual towns.  (Over Siberia)

Congenital congeniality

Territorial pissings

Jehovah's Witness protection program

Left to their own devices

The bizarre miniaturization effect on Japanese cities when seen from the Shinkansen. 

...it was the political version of the Archimedes principle, that the bigger an oppressor gets, the more people get displaced...

Flanders ‘stache (Band name)

Summer sunshine

Wipes the lingering snow

From Fuji's brow

On the island of Shikoku, after the drab tones of winter, spring comes in as an increase in color across the landscape..  Not only with the pink of the plum blossoms and their more celebrated cousins the sakura, but also in the white shapes drifting from temple to temple. 

Above the onsen,

Fog swirls about like transparent witches

Rushing to the mountain wizard's coven.

At an exhibit of Shinto art:

-Mori as reading for 社 (Forest as sacred)

-Nihon Shoki, every kanji character a treasure

-Intake/utaki

-Shinto forms in 8th C.  Buddhist influence

An old birch tree

Raises gnarled arms

To direct traffic.

During my long walks, farmers I pass often tell me that I'm erai when they hear I've walked more than say 10 km.   But they are the ones out here tomorrow doing the same hard physical work, whereas I'll be back at my soft desk.  

 
On the turntable: Grateful Dead, "Dick's Picks Vol. 35"

Odds and Sods

(Some leftovers from the journals, which didn't really fit anywhere else.)

SINGAPORE:
...premise for a Singapore story, about a professional dog walker being a front for a burglar...

...houses in Singapore function not so much as homes but as places to escape the heat...

...a fence for a queue is erected around where I'm sitting.  A perfect Singapore metaphor, this control of personal space...

 ...Echoes of the muezzin's prayer overlaps across the valley, distorting the original word of god...



JAPAN:
...into the narrow valley of Oku Hida and an accompanying claustrophobia probably due to the overcast skies and the fact that it is still winter up here.  The sakura are not even close to bloom, although they've already finished in Kyoto.  Sign of the times in Japan:  staff of our inn is split between Mandarin speakers  and English-speaking Nepalese.  Not a local to be seen, but for the cook who'd pop his head out at the end of the meal, as if in expectation of accolades. Good selection of sake and surprisingly good choice of red wines.  Our small group makes its way through most of the former.  I go back to my room to read my books about Tibet, but I'm not yet ready for the Himalayas.  Not quite done with Japan... 


...in this year's insane heat of July, the crows all seem to have their mouths open. And its the first time I've seen kites in awhile.  I watch one whose tail twitches to catch the thermals and I realize that's probably why I hadn't seen them, as there's been no wind to speak of.  When it has blown, it's been sparse, and hot.  Today for the first time in weeks I can feel a bit of cool coming through my open windows.  Despite that, my body still remains wrapped in its usual sticky film...


...on the commentary for an Ozu film, Donald Richie was talking about how well the Japanese do goodbyes. It got me thinking about the American hello vs. the Japanese goodbye.  It is difficult for the individuality-loving Americans to break their personal laws of inertia to join any type of group, so when they come in they come in strong, with a robust "Hi, how are you?"  The Japanese on the other hand find difficulty in breaking through the tensile strength of the group, and the bows and farewells drag on and on... 


...I began to wonder why 49 days is the magic number for reincarnation. The Buddhists believe that the soul goes through seven stages of tests, each lasting seven days, seven of course being a magic number in many cultures.  But with a little poking around I was pleasantly surprised to find that forty-nine days is also the time in which an embryo is thought to develop, knowledge I believe the ancients were on to...     

...pale diffuse light of winter crawls down the wall...



On the turntable:  Grateful Dead, "Dick's Picks, Vol. 31"

Sunday Papers: Lucian Swift Kirtland

"When a Japanese sleeps his absorption by his dream hours is so complete that one is tempted to believe that his so-called waking hours (no matter how manifested in energy) may be only a hazy interim between periods of a much more important psychic existence."


On the turntable:  Grateful Dead, "Dick's Picks Vol. 28"

Heaven and Earth are Filled...

Learning to see beyond Christian dogma to recognize that Heaven is simply a present existence while engaged in good deeds.  Hell is the opposite, while engaged in bad.  Simple mathematics really:  good begets good; evil begets evil. 

The Chinese have instead looked at this in terms of heaven and earth, where earth is the physical existence we enjoy here on this planet, and Heaven is the elements moving around us, like weather patterns, natural phenomena, etc.   The landscape paintings therefore most often depicted a sage in the mountains, but it's not really him in the mountains as much as him engaging the phenomenally of existence, where the human force and the natural world come the closest to terms.  I suppose had the ancient Chinese been more of a seafaring people, more of their paintings would have depicted the open water, as there too we are the most vulnerable to the whims of nature.  

A decade of zen study in Japan had brought the idea of reincarnation to the fore, that souls eventually transmigrate into something else, as conditioned by the laws of karma.  Yet when my son died, I was puzzled by all my Japanese relatives talking about how he was now in Heaven, or the Pure Land in the Japanese Buddhist idea.  I made temporary sense of this in thinking that the subjective corporeal stamp that was Ken's "soul" was now in Heaven, while the more objective animating "spirit" would reincarnate.     

It was just after university that I started to read more about Buddhism and found myself more and more swayed by it's ideals. The Buddhist concept of the world made more sense to me, and I was able to eventually reconcile in it the Catholic ideals that I had been raised with.  But I was simply unable to make the leap from the Christian concept of Heaven to Buddhist reincarnation. It proved to be a near impenetrable chasm.

Yet Robert Linssen's Living Zen eventually helped me chose one over the other.  The book deftly explains zen usuing the language of a number of disciplines, such as religion, philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics, among others.  But I found clarity in its description of zen in terms of energy, particularly in how energy is always in balance, how atoms (and electricity) are in a constant flow of plus and minus.  I began to see Heaven, at least how Christianity defines it, as a sort of energy bank, where souls go after they die.  It made no sense to me, as it seemed contradictory to what I understood about the world.   

Bizarrely enough, as my understanding of Buddhism evolved, I found that I could no longer believe in reincarnation either. A zen teacher I studied under claimed that reincarnation has no place in traditional Buddhism, and it found its way in later due to the Vedanta-inflected Buddhism that developed later in Tibet.  And this began to make sense.  

Now I feel that reincarnation is simply a metaphor for the body decomposing and its remains going on to feed already existing life forms like worms and vegetation,  then working its way from there up the food chain to create life in new bodies.  

In a metaphorical sense, perhaps the word 'reincarnation' should be replaced instead by 'reanimation.'   Which brings us back to the Christians again.  After all, wasn't Jesus reborn three day after death, like a hermit meditating in cave, this new person born after some sort of enlightened experience?  

Or as others would have it, Christmas's proximity to the Winter Solstice speaks volumes, for on December 21st the sun stops moving southward, pauses, and then starts moving northward.  The very word "solstice," derived from the Latin "sol" for "sun" and "sisto" for "stop."

Thus the confusion continues.  Doubt, I suppose, is a wonderful catalyst for resurrection, of ideas both old and new.   


On the turntable:  Bach, "Cantatas"